‘Godwins’ Law’ Creator Justifies Trump-Hitler Comparisons in Searing Column: ‘The Parallels…Seem Inescapable’
If you’ve been on the Internet long enough, there’s a high probability you’ve encountered Godwin’s Law in one form or another. For those who don’t know, the theoretical rule was devised by attorney and author Mike Godwin back in 1990; the adage is that the longer a discussion plays out online, the more likely it becomes that someone will make a comparison to Adolf Hitler and/or the Nazis.
Critics of Donald Trump have been comparing the former president to Hitler with increased frequency in recent weeks, pointing to his authoritarian tendencies, his dehumanization of political opponents, and his comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an op-ed from Godwin where he reflects on how his law has taken on a life of its own ever since he conceptualized it.
It also makes the argument that “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler.”
While Godwin explains that his law was supposed to be a joking commentary about hyperbole, “It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore” when it comes to Trump. He then accuses Trump’s allies of pushing “a framework to enable fascism” with their efforts to get him re-elected while consolidating as much federal power under his control as possible.
“We have to thank Trump for being admirably forthcoming that he plans to be a dictator — although, he says, only on ‘Day One,” Godwin writes. “What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word ‘vermin’ to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.”
Godwin goes on to express concern about whether increasingly frequent Nazi comparisons have made the public “less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world?” At the same time, he urges such comparisons to keep being made when backed by legitimate arguments about history.
From the column:
The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.
Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.
